Kids learn art of making mummies

EVERETT — Camryn Joy used a popsicle stick to carve out pieces of an apple.

The 6-year-old made a face and ears in the piece of fruit she’d named Queen Tut. Then she stuck the stick in the top of the apple and rolled her creation in a bag containing salt, baking soda and other ingredients.

“It’s gross stuff,” Camryn said.

She was one of 11 kids who Thursday afternoon were part of The Case of Frozen Time, an Imagine Children’s Museum day camp focusing on mummies. The mixture in the children’s bags would help dehydrate their apples, or mummify them over time, said Tanya Feldman, a museum educator.

“It will shrink over time and all the juice will be removed,” she said. “Then you’ll end up with a small apple head.”

Imagine Children’s Museum hosts different camps throughout the year for kids to learn at and have fun, Feldman said. It was the first time the museum has hosted the camp about mummies.

She’d never mummified an apple, said Natalie McCullough, 7, but she told her classmates that she has read books about ancient Egypt.

“They would bury pharaohs when they died,” she said. “They would take some valuable things with them to the afterlife.”

Before making the apple mummies, Feldman also taught her class about hieroglyphics. The children decoded two messages and learned about Amenhotep III, an Egyptian pharaoh. When a pharaoh like Amenhotep or other important people died, the ancient Egyptians used to remove most of the dead person’s organs, including the brain, Feldman said. Those organs were then preserved inside of canopic jars that were buried with the mummy.

Feldman told her students that they would turn empty plastic soda bottles into jars that would include their own secret messages.

During that art project, Madeline Harrington, 10, wrapped her bottle in masking tape and wrote her message in hieroglyphic code with a purple marker.

“It says, ‘I was from 2012 and I live in this bottle,’” she said.

Writing and decoding messages was his favorite project, said Ray Johnson, 8.